Studies of embodied perception have revealed that social, psychological, and physiological factors influence space perception. While many of these influences were observed with real or highly realistic stimuli, the present work showed that even the orientation of abstract geometric objects in a non-realistic virtual environment could influence distance perception. Observers wore a head mounted ...

According to politeness theory (P. Brown & S. Levinson, 1987), politeness serves to both reflect and regulate social distance. On the basis of this notion and on construal level theory (N. Liberman & Y. Trope, 2008; N. Liberman, Y. Trope, & E. Stephan, 2007), it was predicted that politeness would be related to abstract construal, temporal distance, and spatial distance. Eight studies supported...

We argue that probability, like space and time, instantiates psychological distance. Unlikely outcomes may seem more remote than likely outcomes and may therefore be construed at a relatively high level. SpeciWcally, when the probability of an outcome is low, endsrelated primary features should be more salient than means-related secondary features, but as the probability of the outcome increase...

Since its inception, evidence policymakers have vacillated with respect to whether the rule barring hearsay evidence at trial is a doctrine designed to promote decisional accuracy or a doctrine designed to promote procedural justice. To the extent that policymakers view the rule barring hearsay evidence as promoting decisional accuracy, the rationale for this view stems from the “testimonial tr...

Recognition priming and distance estimation were used to investigate the mental representation of knowledge acquired from maps. In Experiment 1, recognition priming showed that cities close in route distance primed each other more than cities far in route distance, even when Euclidean distance was equated. Experiment 2 showed that this finding was robust and not an artifact of the way subjects ...

We show that a certain class of similarity measures, which is based on set-theoretic concepts, and explains many of the characteristics of human similarity assessment, can be interpreted as a distance in a suitable psychological space. This view unifies a number of different measures of similarity that psychological experiments have determined to be active in humans for different classes of sti...

A mediation model using a sample of 1059 adolescents (56% girls; M age=16.02, SD=1.37) tested relations between parenting, adolescent moral identity, and the formation of psychological distance towards others. In short, adolescent moral identity mediated relations between parenting and the ways in which adolescents oriented others in their psychological space. Specifically, adolescent-report pa...